Support Welfare Reform, Reagan Urges Governors

President Reagan asked the nation’s governors Monday to support a welfare reform package that he will send to Congress this morning, although he still faces opposition on some key issues.

Reagan, addressing members of the National Governors’ Assn. in the East Room of the White House, said that “dozens of you have shown an eagerness to pursue new strategies.” The President, noting that he was once a governor himself, said that states and cities “are in the best position to find solutions to welfare dependence.”

The governors, however, have drafted a competing welfare reform plan, and some said that they would lobby members of the House Ways and Means Committee for their plan before leaving Washington this week. Their proposal calls for $1 billion to $2 billion in new spending to combat unemployment, about 90% of which would be financed by the federal government.

Calls for National Standard

In addition, the governors’ plan calls for a national eligibility standard for welfare recipients, which would enable more people to qualify for benefits and would, therefore, cost more.

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater told reporters that the proposals by the governors and the White House are more similar than they are different, which he said is “a very good omen” for favorable action by Congress this term.

Fitzwater said that the White House shares the governors’ objectives to “get people off welfare” by finding jobs they can perform, though “we have some differences on the money side.”

The governors’ plan, like the one to be proposed by the White House, asks for public assistance programs that strengthen and preserve the family structure, seeking “a system where it is always better to work than be on public assistance.”

Arkansas Democratic Gov. Bill Clinton, chairman of the governors’ conference, said that Reagan has not agreed to the price tag of the governors’ welfare proposal. But Clinton said that, in private discussions, the President approved of the governors’ “contract idea” in which “everybody with a child 3 years old and older should have to engage in education, training and work.”